Perempuan Tanah Jahanam: Expect The Unexpected, But Not In A Good Way

I’m not usually a huge fan of particularly well-worn premises, mostly because the potential for surprise, in my experience, is pretty low. Is it a little reductive to say “if you’ve seen one ‘The Possession Of…’ movie, you’ve seen them all?” Yeah, probably. But at the same time, flip through any number of horror films on your streaming site of choice and see how often the same blurbs turn up. People who move into a new house and discover something is very wrong. People who move into an OLD house and discover that something is very wrong. People in difficult situations forced to reckon with their personal demons or dark secret. People vacationing at a cabin and discovering that they’re being stalked by a mysterious presence…you get the idea. There are few entirely original ideas under the sun.

But that’s also okay, because a story is more than what’s being told, it’s also HOW it’s being told. And when you tell an old story well, the results can be really exciting.

So, I guess this is where my problems with Perempuan Tanah Jahanam (Impetigore, literal translation “Hell Woman”) come in. The story itself is nothing new, but how it’s told does it no favors at all. The film starts strong and has some great visuals, but ultimately falls apart into something sluggish and repetitive, squandering a lot of the potential in the story it could tell.

It opens up on a toll plaza, late at night. Two booth operators, Maya and Dini, exchange casual chatter, gossip, the usual ways of whiling away a long shift at a dull job. Maya’s complaining about one particular creepy regular customer when, lo and behold, here he comes again. And yeah, he just kind of spends the entire transaction staring at Maya. He tells her he’s from a small village called Harjosari, and oddly keeps calling her “Rahayu.” Eventually, another car comes up behind him and honks for him to get a move on. Maya breathes a sigh of relief until she sees that he’s just parked by the side of the road on the other side of the plaza. And he’s walking toward her. And he has a machete.

Maya tries to run, but he catches up to her, and his look is oddly pleading. He says that he just wants what’s happening to his family to stop, that they don’t want what her parents gave them. Before he can kill her, he’s shot dead by the police.

Maya and Dini take this as a cue to quit their jobs as toll booth operators and start the clothing business they’ve always talked about. Only that doesn’t go so well, peddling cheap designer knockoffs in the market stalls of Jakarta is a rough way to make a living, and they’re falling behind on rent. Maya gets an idea. See, she never knew her parents, and all she has to remember them by is a single photo that her aunt has. It shows a young Maya standing with her mother and father in front of a huge, palatial house in Harjosari.

But the name on the back of the photo isn’t “Maya,” it’s ”Rahayu.”

So, against all good instinct, Maya and Dini take off for Harjosari, a small village way out in the sticks. A village that most people don’t want to talk about or take them to. But Maya’s sure that as the daughter of the homeowners, she could sell her family’s house for the kind of money that could bail her and Dini out of debt. It’s a small, poor village, and there aren’t any children around, and her parents’ house stands long-abandoned. You think you know how it’s going to go from here - woman returns to the family home and the dark secret that it holds - but it’s not really a haunted-house story, which is too bad, because it could have been a really good haunted-house story. The visuals are evocative (making especially good use of light and shadow, with traditional Javanese shadow puppetry as a recurring motif), and there’s plenty of atmosphere, lots of foggy forests and suitably dark, shadowy, cobwebbed interiors in the family home. Something bad happened here, and nobody wants to talk about it. There’s a real unease there.

But after a suitably creepy start, the film decides that the real center of the story isn’t this creepy abandoned house and the mysteries of Maya’s childhood after all. Instead, it puts all of its energy into the story of a remote village suffering under a curse, which wouldn’t be a bad storyline either (especially since it seems to be tied to Maya’s parents somehow) except it ends up taking over the whole movie. The house is only used for a handful of scenes and there’s little in the way of investigation. Worse, the basic outlines of the story the film presents are easy to figure out pretty early in, so there are very few twists or shocking revelations that actually land. For any reasonably attentive viewer, they’re going to have the broad outlines figured out in about ten minutes, and the rest is just the film catching up to where the audience already is. Almost everything plays out exactly like you’d expect it to, and most of the second act consists of reiterating what we’ve already figured out - there’s a curse, Maya’s family is involved somehow, and it affects the children born in the village - so the middle of the film drags pretty badly. Since a lot of it is just going over the same narrative ground again and again, there’s no reason for the film to be nearly two hours long. 

Then, as if that weren’t enough, in the third act we get an extended flashback that adds some new information (I guess it’s a twist, but I’d think a twist would be something that meaningfully changes the story, and I don’t think this does) that you wouldn’t really be able to puzzle out yourself, a climax that is pretty much exactly what you think it’s going to be, and then it ends on what could be a nice nod to another, better movie, but then insists on tacking a totally unnecessary “one year later” tag on the end. In some ways, it’s more of a melodrama (albeit a bloody one - throats keep getting cut in this film) than horror, strictly speaking. Ultimately what are supposed to be the shocking revelations feel more like kind of a supernatural soap opera than anything else, and when I stopped to think about them, they actually made everything make less sense. But not in a creepily ambiguous way, in a “hold on…what?” way.

Which sucks, because it’s got a look and locations that cry out for something that’s primarily about evil spirits and how the old ways persist even into today, but nah, let’s belabor this whole curse thing for about an hour in case the audience missed that there was a curse. Because there’s totally a curse. Yes, you figured thar out early in the second act, but we’re going to keep telling you anyway. The result feels like something that defies your expectations in all the wrong ways.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon